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Re: [Land-speed] Making your Tow Truck Automatic live a long

To: drmayf@mayfco.com
Subject: Re: [Land-speed] Making your Tow Truck Automatic live a long
From: <ifixmgs@cox.net>
Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 0:22:45 -0400
Mayf,

I have a 502 Bowtie/400 turbo in a  90 Suburban 1500  that doesn't go anywhere 
without a trailer behind it.   Our biggest is an all steel 1970's era 32' 
Philips horse trailer that's built like a tank.  With 2 big horses, and all of 
our equipment, it weighs in at 9500  pounds.  My alum radiator (junk yard 
special) was for a stick shift and my budget for a Jegs trans cooler was blown. 
    I found a 2" thick room-sized AC condenser with 3/8" tubes.  I mounted it 
up front and horizontally on the right inner fender with a small  Nipondenso 
cooling fan mounted on the underside pulling cooler air up from  the road.   
The trans fluid (regular petro) has stayed  clean, bright red and smelling like 
new.   As I recall from   SAE notes when ATF   operates at 200*f for any length 
of time service life goes to half of Mfgr normal change sched.  And I'm pretty 
sure it gets cut in half with subsequent 20-25*f increases in op-temp.  

When I was crew chief on a winged supermodified car in the 70s, we had 
occassional engine oil temp problems on dusty, muddy tracks. I sealed a forward 
section of frame rail and filled it with a half gallon of water thru a  
screw-in shrade valve hole, and  pressurized it to 50 psi. A very small 1/8"  
ball valve operated by a choke cable routed a length of brake tubing to the oil 
cooler.  The far end of the tubing was pinched off tight and a line of small 
(maybe 1/32") holes faced the oil cooler.  Toward the end of the race when the 
cooler would choke up with dust and dirt, and oil temp started rising way up, 
the driver opened the valve and sprayed down the oil cooler.  It worked well 
enough for the effort that went into it, and didn't have any further main 
bearing wear problems.     

Same principle could be applied using a pressurized, insulated air tank with 
chilled water, a nitrous or 12v landscaping solenoid, and   a fogging spray bar 
 across the radiator or trans cooler, and/or on top of the  trans housing for 
heavy uphill tows.  The colder  the top of the alum  trans gets , the faster 
heat will be carried off and the less work the cooler has to do.    Only 
problem is that going across the desert in 120 heat hauling a 5,000 pound 
trailer might take a water tender and one of those towable air compressors..... 
Mark C 


Back in the '60's when Ed Tradup  was running a digger, he had an old
> > International tow truck that he had stuffed a big GM V-8 with TH-400 into.
> > For a cooler he put a big AC condenser from the same car between the
> > frame rail's. It worked like a champ, not the best location but it was so 
> > big
> > it 
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